


let me say the words you can't

by Terapsina



Category: Sweet/Vicious (TV)
Genre: A 'Blink and you'll miss it' Juphelia moment, Angst, Female Friendship, Gen, Possibly Pre-Femslash, Preemptive Fix-It, Rape Aftermath, Women Protecting Women
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 05:13:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8877358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Terapsina/pseuds/Terapsina
Summary: (I think the scum person Nate is going to tell Kennedy that he "cheated" on her with Jules. I'm preemptively fixing it.)

-
Ophelia finds Jules crying and offers to tell Kennedy the truth that Jules hasn't managed to let out.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains mentions of the rape, but only as much as is necessary for Kennedy to be told about it. There's nothing graphic.

Ophelia finds Jules crying in the back of the record store. Her knees to her chest, her arms hugging her legs and her pained eyes staring off into distance.

“Shit.” Ophelia curses and drops her bag to slide to her own knees in front of her, carefully not touching her. She swallows the stupid _‘are you okay?’_ that wants to come out, because Jules is obviously not and instead goes with the more direct “What happened?” and “Are we kicking their asses?”

Jules doesn’t even smile, just lets her expression break further.

“Kennedy kicked me out.”

“Wait. What?” Kennedy has always made her uncomfortable, and not that she’d admit it aloud but it might be a bit because the young woman’s everything Ophelia could never manage to be for her parents, peppy and happy and crazy driven. But Kennedy is also a really good friend to Jules. So this makes no sense whatsoever. “Why?”

“Nate-” Jules’s face pulls into a sick expression and for the dozenth time Ophelia wants to don her mask and bring all the vigilante whoop-ass on that scum person she can, but she’s never addressed it and she won’t until Jules is ready to, because she knows it will need to be Jules that delivers the blows. Ophelia plans to be there by her side backing her up, but she knows Jules well enough by now to know that it won’t be enough for her to just let someone else deliver them. “Nate told her he... he lied, he told her he cheated on her with me.”

And here Jules looks like she’s on the precipice of breaking again. And Ophelia feels the familiar low grade anger grow into a simmering sort of rage at the back of her mind.

She really can’t wait to see him laid out on the floor as the bleeding sniveling worm that he is.

But she takes in Jules’s wet face and knows that right now it’s not Nate Griffin and what his name on the wall of that bathroom _means to her_ that’s hurting her. It’s losing her best friend to his lie.

“Did you tell her?” Ophelia asks as gently as she can but grimaces because it still comes out wrong. She’s bad at this, making someone that’s hurting feel better, she’s so much better at making the hurt _er_ pay.

“No.” Jules answers, it comes out half a sob and Ophelia needs to stop herself from hugging her, it’s still strange to her, how quickly she’s come to care for Jules so much. She slowly reaches out for Jules’s hand instead and then lets it rest an inch from her skin, until Jules breaches the distance and squeezes Ophelia’s hand tightly. Ophelia ignores the pain and squeezes back.

“I tried to.” Jules says after a moment with a guilt in her voice that shouldn’t be there but is. “But I couldn’t... I- I can’t.”

Ophelia’s mind swims around for something, anything that she can do to fix this and realizes there’s something. Maybe. But she needs Jules’s permission.

“Let me.”

“What?” Jules flinches back a bit and finally connects her eyes with Ophelia’s. Ophelia looks back beseeching and sure.

“You can’t. I get it. But maybe... maybe I could say it for you. I mean, if you want me to. I won’t if you tell me not to, I would never tell this to anyone if you didn’t want me to. But if you can’t tell Kennedy that Nate raped you, but you want to... then I could do it.”

Jules starts looking at Ophelia like she’s never seen her before, or like she just realized that Ophelia can really see _her_ , and Ophelia tries not start fidgeting. This feels important. Like Jules is about to do something huge and if Ophelia so much as _breathes_ the moment will break and this friendship, this partnership they’ve started to build will somehow be injured too.

“Okay.” Ophelia barely hears it, the word Jules lets out is so quiet it’s barely a whisper, but Ophelia does hear it.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

They stay like that for a moment. Fingers interlacing so tightly they’re starting to tingle and eyes caught in each other.

Ophelia coughs, trying to break herself out of the moment before she can start translating the sudden and new squeezing feeling in her chest.

“Do you want me to go now, or...?”

“No. Stay for a minute, alright?” Jules sounds tired suddenly and Ophelia nods seriously and then scoots over to sit on the ground beside her, their backs resting against the wall.

She’ll stay as long as Jules needs her to.

-

“Get out!” Kennedy yells at her as soon she sees who has opened her bedroom door.

She looks rougher than Ophelia has ever seen her. Her hair a mess, her makeup a runny disaster and a picture of her and Jules on the ground inside its shattered frame.

Despite herself Ophelia finds herself feeling for Kennedy’s broken heart too. And she knows that what she has to say won’t exactly mend it.

“No.” Ophelia answers and closes the door behind her “I need to talk to you about something.”

“I don’t wanna talk with you. Or with Jules. Or with Nate. Or with anyone, so you can just go back out and tell them both to go to hell.”

“Yeah, well I’m _half_ with you there.” Ophelia mutters to herself, but not loud enough for Kennedy to hear. She continues a bit more strongly. “Well tough, because you’re going to listen.”

There’s an ugly expression building on Kennedy's face and Ophelia gets it, she does, but the girl’s scary enough in a good mood, she needs to cut to the chase before she meets scorned Kennedy.

“Jules didn’t cheat on you with your crap boyfriend.” she bites back and immediately winces, not that the sentiment isn’t true, but she maybe should have started out a bit more delicately.

“Yeah, well Jules’s silence on the subject kinda says otherwise doesn’t it?” Kennedy answers sweetly vicious, Ophelia’s impressed, that’s a hard combo to convey. Then the furious sorority head turns on her heel and starts pacing. “God, this all makes sense. How did I not see this? She’s been weird all year, not wanting to spend any time with me, avoiding Nate, vanishing off to who knows where. I should have known it was a guilty conscience. She was my best friend, how could she do this to me?”

“She _didn’t!_ ” Ophelia almost screams, trying to cut Kennedy off before she works herself to a point where she won’t hear a word Ophelia’s saying.

Kennedy stops and looks like she’d almost forgotten that there was anyone beside her in the room.

Before she can open her mouth again Ophelia opens hers to say what she came here to say.

“Jules didn’t cheat on you with your boyfriend. She didn’t have sex with him.” She repeats herself, and then flounders for a moment, wow, this is really hard. Ophelia can’t even imagine how hard it’s been for Jules if even _she_ has trouble pushing the next words out. “Nate Griffin raped her. Last year. She didn’t help your boyfriend cheat on you. She didn’t betray you. She didn’t _consent_. He raped her.”

Kennedy looks like Ophelia punched her in the gut.

“No...” Kennedy’s face draws into pained denial, but all the anger has gone out of her voice and shoulders and Ophelia can see her mind already re-configuring the available data. “That’s not... she would have told me. If she... if he r-... she would have _told_ me.”

“I don’t have inside scoop into her brain, so you’ll have to talk to her about why she didn’t... or couldn’t, but believe me, whatever the hell that scum of the gutter told you, he was lying to cover his ass.”

Kennedy believes her, Ophelia reads it in the split second where she shudders and swallows reflexively. In the way she looks down and stares at the grinning faces staring up at her from the broken photo.

“Oh goddess.” Kennedy’s body scrunches in on itself as she leans forward and Ophelia is well versed with that expression so she moves to open the door to the hallway before Kennedy runs past her to go for the bathroom.

By the time Ophelia catches up Kennedy is heaving over the toilet and breathing heavily.

“Is... is Jules alright?” Kennedy asks, her love for their friend back in her voice but accented with a pain that’s all new. “I mean, I know she’s not. But...”

“She’s the strongest person I’ve ever met, she’ll survive. But... you should talk to her, tell her you don’t hate her. Tell her you believe her.” the air grows heavy and awkward again so Ophelia quickly adds “Hopefully add that she can come back before she moves into the back of Harris’s record shop and and he kills me.”

Ophelia sees Kennedy do that thing where she’s pretending not to want to roll her eyes. 

“Does she know you’re here?”

“She knows.”

“So are you really her tutor or...”

Ophelia doesn’t want to lie so she says nothing, but Kennedy seems to take it as an answer anyway and nods. For the second time that night Ophelia slides to the floor to keep someone company.

And the floor is actually way less gross here than it is at the store.

“Wow, you guys clean a lot. I could probably eat off this floor.”

“Well, don’t.” Kennedy answers, some of her old tone back in her voice.

-

Jules and Kennedy are looking at each other like two spooked horses from two sides of Ophelia’s apartment. Before going to talk to Kennedy that’s where she’d sent Jules in case her conversation didn’t go as well as she hoped.

Of course now she feels like a third wheel in her own home.

“I’m sorry.” Both of them say at once while Ophelia goes for the fridge and tries not to intrude.

“You have _nothing_ to be sorry for.” Kennedy immediately responds. “You didn’t do anything wrong, I’m the one who didn’t notice my own best friend hurting.”

“You couldn’t have known, Kennedy. How could you have? I didn’t say anything. Even when I should have, I should have protected you from...”

“Don’t. Jules... okay yeah, I’m sick to my stomach that I cared about him even when he'd done this to you. And I hate that I didn’t know, that I couldn’t be there for you when you needed me to be-”

“You were, though. You were there for me. You always have been. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

Ophelia tries not to be too hurt by that one. It’s not like she doesn’t get it, Harris is that person to Ophelia after all, but somehow hearing this still hurts a bit.

The room falls into silence, the only sound being the one Ophelia’s making by digging through the fridge. She finally lands on a two day old pizza slice and a can of beer. “Score!”

She raises her head to be met by two separate blinking stares. She waves her hand in a vague _‘don’t mind me’_ gesture and moves for the hallway. She’s gonna wait this conversation out from outside.

She did her part. The rest is up to the two of them. And she thinks it would be better without a third pair of ears intruding.

**Author's Note:**

> So... was this any good? Or is me staying away from writing for Sweet/Vicious better for everyone?


End file.
